“The way you walk, the way you hold yourself,” said his aunt Xi Pen. “Even the words you choose—it’s as if he’s standing before me!”

So Zheng attempted to change himself. He copied the loping gait of his older brother, Deng, whom no one ever compared to their father. Before he spoke, he paused to rearrange the words in his head and choose different ones that meant the same thing. He couldn’t change his face, though, and every time he walked past the harbor, the giant statue of his father reminded Zheng just how much they resembled each other. So one night he snuck out to the harbor with a rope and a winch and, with a great deal of effort, he pulled the thing down.

On his thirtieth birthday, the dreams began. He was plagued by nighttime visions of the old man—starved and leathery, white beard to his knees, no longer resembling Zheng at all—waving desperately from the desert shore of some sunbaked island. Zheng would startle awake in the wee hours, sweat beading his brow, tormented by guilt. He’d made a promise to his father, one he’d never even attempted to fulfill.

Come and find me.

His herbalist prepared him a draught of strong medicine, which he took each night before bed, and it kept him sound asleep and dreamless until morning.

Shut out of his dreams, Zheng’s father found other ways to haunt him.

Zheng found himself lingering by the docks one day, entertaining a mysterious impulse to jump into the ocean and go for a swim—in the middle of winter. He choked back the urge, and for weeks did not allow himself to even look at the sea.

A short time later he was captaining a voyage to Shanghai when, belowdecks, he heard the song of a whale. He put his ear to the hull and listened. For a moment he thought he could understand what the whale, in its long, unearthly vowels, was saying.

Co . . . co . . . bo . . . lo!

He plugged his ears with cotton, ran upstairs, and refused to go belowdecks again. He began to worry that he was losing his mind, just as his father had.

Back home on land, he had a new dream, one even his nightly draught of medicine could not suppress. In it, Zheng was bushwhacking through an island’s tropical interior as rubies rained softly from the trees. The muggy air seemed to breathe his name—Zheng, Zheng—and though he could feel his father’s presence all around him, he saw no one. Exhausted, he lay down in a patch of grass, and then suddenly it grew up around him, the sod peeling away from the earth to wrap him in a suffocating embrace.

He startled awake with his feet itching like mad. Throwing back the covers, he was alarmed to discover that they were covered in grass. He tried to brush it off, but every blade was connected to his feet. They were sprouting from his soles.